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A review by mike_morse
The Believer: Encounters with the Beginning, the End, and our Place in the Middle by Sarah Krasnostein
3.0
This is structurally the most annoying book I’ve ever finished. The book consists of six stories. To quote the book jacket, they are profiles of, “a death doula, a geologist who believes the world is six thousand years old, a lecturer in neurobiology who spends his weekends ghost hunting, the fiancée of a disappeared pilot and UFO enthusiasts, a woman incarcerated for killing her husband after suffering years of domestic violence, and Mennonite families in New York [City]”. The stories are told, infuriatingly to me, interleaved. It’s as if I told you I had three stories to tell you, and I proceeded with the first story, then 5 minutes into it I started the second, and 5 minutes into that I started the third. After another 5 minutes, I went back and continued the first story and so on. That’s the first half of the book. The second half tells the next group of three stories. When I got in about 1/3 of the book, I had the idea that I would just skip around and read the chapters for each story sequentially, but I realized that was too much work, since I was almost at the end of the first set of three stories. Arrggghhh!
The next problem with the book is I don’t know exactly what it’s about. On one hand (4 of the stories), it’s about people who believe things that are, for most people, unbelievable. But what about the death doula (a woman who makes it her job to guide dying people in gracefully dying), and the woman who killed her husband and went to prison? There’s nothing unbelievable or extraordinary about their stories. And even for the people who believe unbelievable things, it’s not clear what the author makes of it. On the one hand, she paints them as kooks, but on the other, she is very sympathetic to what motivates them. And after many of the chapters she adds her own bits of philosophy, which I did not find particularly interesting.
So why even three stars? It’s because I think it’s an important book. What we’re seeing world wide is an explosion of anti-science beliefs, but most people I know probably don’t know well a single person, for example, who believes that aliens are flying around the earth abducting people. With so many people believing unbelievable things, I really appreciate the author’s sincere attempt to spend a lot of time with these folks and unjudgementally try to find out what makes them tick.
The next problem with the book is I don’t know exactly what it’s about. On one hand (4 of the stories), it’s about people who believe things that are, for most people, unbelievable. But what about the death doula (a woman who makes it her job to guide dying people in gracefully dying), and the woman who killed her husband and went to prison? There’s nothing unbelievable or extraordinary about their stories. And even for the people who believe unbelievable things, it’s not clear what the author makes of it. On the one hand, she paints them as kooks, but on the other, she is very sympathetic to what motivates them. And after many of the chapters she adds her own bits of philosophy, which I did not find particularly interesting.
So why even three stars? It’s because I think it’s an important book. What we’re seeing world wide is an explosion of anti-science beliefs, but most people I know probably don’t know well a single person, for example, who believes that aliens are flying around the earth abducting people. With so many people believing unbelievable things, I really appreciate the author’s sincere attempt to spend a lot of time with these folks and unjudgementally try to find out what makes them tick.